Comics in Context #114: Christmas with Carl Barks

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Disney's Duckman cometh.

By Peter Sanderson

Like Santa Claus, a critic must distinguish between the Naughty and the Nice. Last week I dealt with the Naughty. This week I am happy to present my third annual Christmas column, in which I celebrate the Nice.

As I approached doing column #100, I wondered which major figures in comics and animation had I not yet covered. This week I can cross another name off my list, for my principal subject is one of the greatest figures in the history of the comics medium, the "Good Artist" and writer who created Scrooge McDuck, the late Carl Barks. In the aforementioned column # 24 I wrote about a Barks story that was reprinted by Gemstone Publishing in 2003 in the first issue of their revival of the classic series Walt Disney's Christmas Parade. Yes, that was one of those seasonal giant comics that my fellow IGN Columnist, Festive Fred Hembeck, mentioned in "The Fred Hembeck Show: Episode 26." Barks did many more Christmas stories over the decades, and this week we will look at several of them, including his greatest.

The opening story in Gemstone's Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #2 (2004) is Carl Barks's Donald Duck story "You Can't Guess!" (from the original Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #2, 1950). Of course we know that Barks's Scrooge McDuck is the world's richest duck &#Array; or living creature of any species &#Array; but what's surprising about this tale is how prosperous various other cast members are. In fact, it opens with Donald's nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie bewildered as to what they want for Christmas. They finally realize, "Gee, we already have just about everything."

This introduces one of the themes of these Barksian Christmas stories: guilt over one's own good fortune in life. Huey, Dewey and Louie write to Santa Claus, unselfishly asking him to give their share of presents to other kids "who don't have many nice things." That touches on another Barksian theme: empathy for the poor and unfortunate.

Yet another Barksian theme soon raises its head. No sooner have Huey, Dewey and Louie mailed their "unselfish" letter to Santa than they spot a toy building set and fixate on it: there is something that they want after all. Their noble unselfishness has vanished. Even though these stories were intended for an audience of small children, Barks repeatedly demonstrates the complexity of emotion, showing that the intentions that a person expresses may mask his or true motivations. (Most people would call the "building set" an "erector set," but maybe Disney wanted to avoid any double entendres.)

Since they have already instructed Santa via the mail not to give them anything, Huey, Dewey and Louie now have to persuade their Uncle Donald to get them the building set instead. This is a clever plot device on Barks's part, enabling him to focus on the reality of Christmas gift giving &#Array; that it's the parents, or surrogate parents like Donald, who buy the gifts &#Array; without disturbing his young audience's belief in Santa. It's as if even back in the 1940s and 1950s Barks was consciously writing for two audiences at one, for kids and for adults, even if he himself and his editor were the only adults he knew were reading them!

Yet another Barksian theme is the value of hard work. When the nephews ask Donald for a building set, he considers, "I don't believe in kids getting things quite so easily. Suppose I make you do something to earn it?"

Surprisingly, though, Donald doesn't mean that they should work for their present. "You should have to worry!" he tells them, thus suggesting yet another Barksian theme: the anxiety of the middle class everyman, as incarnated by Donald the Everyduck.

There is an archetypal story device in which the protagonist must solve a riddle that is posed to him: you see it in the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the fairy tale about Rumplestiltskin, Puccini's opera "Turandot," and, of course, in the conflicts between Batman and the Riddler. Now Donald, his eyes lit up with pleasure, plays the Riddler's role, and tells his nephews that he will get them the building set if they can guess what it is he wants for Christmas.

Barksian characters will go to absurdly extreme lengths to get what they want, as we begin to see now: Huey, Dewey and Louie compile an encyclopedic list of possible presents, but none of them is the answer to the riddle. They enlist Daisy's help, and she takes the decidedly unhappy Donald to a mind reader, but she cannot solve the mystery, either.

Here I should mention how sharply Barks's comics version of Donald and his nephews varies from the animated cartoon version. In the animated shorts, Donald is, to use John Byrne's description once more, Disney's Hulk, with his volcanic rages, and he often wages war against his nephews. Certainly there are times when Barks's comics Donald loses his temper, too, but it is instructive to see Donald looking grumpy in the mind reader's waiting room. Instead of exploding in a temper tantrum, he quietly seethes. When she finally slaps Donald (on telepathically discovering how ugly he thinks she is, and oh, is he right), Donald does not fight back, whereas the animated Donald would have gone into full Hulk-out mode. Barks's comics version is more of a put-upon victim of life. For that matter, the animated shorts' Donald doesn't seem to like his nephews enough to give them presents; Barks's comics Donald is much more of a family man.

Next the nephews attempt to enlist the age of their miserly great-uncle Scrooge, who characteristically becomes enraged at the very notion of Christmas presents, inasmuch as they cost money.

But then Scrooge reconsiders, realizing that if Donald doesn't buy the nephews the building set, he &#Array; "poor old Uncle Scrooge," as he puts it &#Array; will be expected to do so instead. Intent on saving money, Scrooge determines to solve the mystery of what Donald wants, and hires a hypnotist to force Donald to reveal the solution. This stratagem likewise fails, and only on rereading did I realize that hiring the hypnotist probably already cost Scrooge more than the building set would. But George Santayana's aphorism that Chuck Jones used to apply to Wile E. Coyote applies to Scrooge: to paraphrase, a fanatic keeps on striving even after he has forgotten his goal.

Now notice that Scrooge is helping Huey, Dewey and Louie get their present, not out of any Christmas spirit, but out of pure selfishness: so that he won't have to buy it himself. Once again the nobility of a character's outward actions are undercut by Barks's revelation of his actual motives.

Although it never occurs to them that Donald may want a new car, Daisy and Scrooge each come to the decision that Donald needs a new car.

In fact, on first reading, I thought that the car was too obvious a solution to the mystery, and kept expecting a final twist: that Donald may need a car, but actually wants something far more impractical. But no, the car is the answer to the riddle!

So Scrooge and Daisy each decide to buy Donald a new car. Of course for Scrooge the cost of a car is infinitesimal, but I was surprised at Daisy. Readers, how many middle class people do you know who would buy somebody that expensive a gift?

Once again, neither Daisy nor Scrooge is acting out of the Christmas spirit, or even out of kindly feelings towards Donald, but rather out of their own self-interest. Daisy buys the car as "something I won't be ashamed to ride in!" Too cheap to keep a chauffeur on the payroll, and apparently too haughty to drive himself, Scrooge buys Donald a car because you "never can tell when I may need him to drive me someplace!"

Donald's car has now ceased to function, and, not qualifying as the best of surrogate parents, he has the kids pushing it to a service station. This is not the best moment for Donald to run into his annoying cousin, Gladstone Gander, who smugly mocks the car. Now here's the Donald we know from animation: his temper flares, and he and Gladstone are soon locked in battle, although neither one seems brave enough to actually land a punch.

I pause here for an important digression, and to salute Don Rosa, Barks' artistic heir, who miraculously captures so much of the look and sensibility of Barks's stories in his own chronicles of Scrooge and Donald's exploits. But i do have a few disagreements with Rosa. In a text piece in his wonderful new biography in comics form, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (which you all should buy), Rosa disparages the idea of luck playing a role in Scrooge's rise to incredible wealth. Another of Barks's creations, the "slinky sorceress" Magica De Spell, believes that Scrooge's "Number One" dime, the first coin he ever earned, is the key to his extraordinary success, and that if she can steal the dime, she too will gain wealth and power, But Rosa points out, quite correctly, that Barks repeatedly showed how much hard work it took for Scrooge to build his fortune (in both senses of the word, I suppose).

That's true, but I don't think it's the whole story. It bothers me less that Rosa's theory means that Ms. De Spell is deluded that the dime has any powers, than that it makes Scrooge look ridiculous.

This year I was very pleased to pick up Gemstone's Uncle Scrooge #342 (June 2005), which reprints one my all-time favorite Barks stories from my childhood, "Raven Mad" (originally published in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #265 in 1962), in which Magica schemes to stick the "Number One" dime to the top of a rocket heading to the sun: the dime will melt, releasing its "occult powers." Magica gloats, "I'll get extra rich every time I get a sunburn!" (Scrooge comments, "Laziest way to make money I ever heard of," thus reiterating Barks's theme of the virtues of work.) Although to my now middle-aged eyes, the story no longer seems to be as rapidly paced and suspenseful as it did when I was a child. But the story still ends with an amazing spectacle, with Scrooge fainting dead away, as the rocket blasts off, with Magica literally leaping in ecstatic triumph, whereupon their fortunes abruptly reverse themselves in an instant, as the raven of the title drops the retrieved "Number One" dime into Scrooge's hand!

If the "Number One" dime has no more than sentimental value for Scrooge, then why do he &#Array; and Donald and the nephews &#Array; risk their necks over and over battling Magica over it? Why not just let her have the dime? If the power of luck does not exist, then what is the point of "Raven Mad"?

I believe that Barks considers both hard work and luck to be important. Scrooge earns his good fortune (in both senses) through all the effort he has put into making it. Gladstone is exasperating to Donald because he has not earned his amazing, invincible good luck, which enables him to live quite comfortably without ever having to do an iota of work, which he arrogantly disdains. Gladstone is lazy; the concept of work also seems to frighten him.

No matter how "lucky" his "Number One" dime is, Scrooge had to struggle through his long life to build his fortune, whereas in this story Donald taunts the car-less Gladstone, "You're lucky at finding nickels, but automobiles are clear out of your class!"

Caught up in the passion of the moment, Gladstone boasts that his luck is so great that it will enable him to buy Donald a new car for Christmas. So, here's somebody else who is giving Donald a present for the wrong reason: Gladstone is merely trying to get the better of his old rival. As soon as Donald leaves, Gladstone is literally bent down with worry, afraid that not even his luck is mighty enough to bring him enough money to buy a new car. But of course it is: in fact, Gladstone acquires enough money to buy himself a car as well. (Now surely it must have occurred to some Disney writer to do a story in which Magica pits Gladstone's luck against that of Scrooge's "Number One" dime, right? If it hasn't, well, what are you guys waiting for?)

The only cast member who buys Donald a new car out of sheer goodheartedness is Grandma Duck, though I'm surprised that she has enough money to give such an expensive gift.

Barks's version of Huey, Dewey and Louie are usually more perceptive than their elders, so I'm surprised that they don't figure out what Donald wants for Christmas until, exasperated over his rickety car, he finally blurts it out in front of them. A good sport (more so than his animated counterpart), Donald keeps his side of the bargain and buys the building set, or rather, three of them so the kids won't fight over them (though Barks's versions of the three nephews are too well-mannered to do such a thing).

Unaware that the boys have solved the mystery, Daisy buys them three building sets as well. Is she doing this out of a sense of guilt, so they won't be unhappy?

In a great throwaway gag, Barks pictures Scrooge fuming while immersed in a bathtub full of not water but gold coins. Apparently he gets a sensual feeling from money, as we shall see further. Engaging in a classic example of Freudian projection, Scrooge decides that Donald is too much of a "tightwad" to buy the boys their present, so he gets them three building sets, too, out of a sense of duty. Gladstone likewise buys three sets, in his case just to impress Donald with his magnanimousness. Even Grandma misjudges Donald, and buys three more sets because she thinks he is too much of a "scatterbrain" to get one.

So, in the tale's happy ending, Donald and the nephews get what they wanted for Christmas many times over. And only we readers know that in most cases the Christmas spirit had little or nothing to do with the motivations of their benefactors. But, hey, the kids are happy, as we see in Barks's final coup, as he ends the story with Huey, Dewey and Louie riding up on the giant robot horse they built with their Christmas presents!

Another Barks story in this issue, "The Snow Chaser" (1960), is not about Christmas bit about winter. Gyro Gearloose tests his new "snow chaser" invention, which instantly evaporates snow. But one tampers with the weather at one's peril: overuse of the snow chaser ends up triggering a dangerous electrical storm. Gyro is unable to undo the damage, but order is restored through nature, in the form of Grandma Duck's farm animals. This story is forty-five years old, but doesn't it seem newly relevant to the world's current concerns about global warming?

Yet another Barks story in this issue, "Christmas Cheers" (1963), finds Donald and the nephews far less prosperous than in "You Can't Guess!"

Huey, Dewey and Louie want a "science set" for Christmas, and Donald wants a dump truck so he can use it to start a hauling business, but he can't afford to buy either. Even the Duckburg city government wishes it had enough funds to repave Quack Street. In each case, the characters' only hope is in the generosity of Scrooge McDuck, which doesn't exist.

But then, by accident (or luck), Huey, Dewey and Louie discover gold on what turns out to be Scrooge's property. The nephews wisely won't tell Scrooge where the gold is until he buys them the science set. Then, when Scrooge needs a trustworthy driver to carry the enormous gold nuggets, the nephews talk him into buying Donald a dump truck. Scrooge even ends up paying to have Quack Street paved so Donald can drive the gold-laden truck over it. The moral appears to be that the wise person learns to get what he wants by manipulating the self-interests of the people with wealth and power.

In the end Scrooge gets his comeuppance for his miserliness, when a freak accident results in one of the huge gold nuggets being used to pave Quack Street. Thinking Scrooge has given then a Christmas present, overjoyed "hoboes and taxpayers" dig up their share of the street. So, it turns out that the old saying about America's streets being paved with gold was true in one instance here in Duckburg.

This year's Walt Disney Christmas Parade #3 starts out with a Barks "duck tale" from 1948, "The Golden Christmas Tree," which combines Halloween and Christmas imagery long before Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas did. Donald and his nephews find themselves tangling with a witch who is out to eliminate all Christmas trees. In a nice metafictional touch, Donald reads in the newspaper that this witch looks like the one in Snow White, presumably meaning the Disney version! But this witch is rather modern, using her shapeshifting powers to transform into various machines, as well as into a femme fatale duck to tempt Donald. But Donald defeats her by getting hold of her broom, the source of her powers. Rather than, say, wish for world peace, Donald uses the broom to satisfy his own vanity, making himself look "big and handsome" (and, perhaps inadvertently on Barks's part, rather like Gladstone Gander!). But then the "Golden Christmas Tree" appears: it turns out to be a manifestation of "the Spirit of Christmas" (So is this a Christmas version of the Biblical burning bush?). which had been imprisoned by the witch. Guilt rears its head again: Donald confesses, "Tree, you make me feel like a heel" for using his new powers to benefit only himself. Seemingly unselfishly, Donald gives the magic broom to the tree, though once again a character's motives are not what they seem. Donald thinks he will retain his new good looks: he doesn't, and flies into an animated rage when he learns the truth.

The other Barks story in this issue is an utterly unsentimental Christmas story dedicated to this same theme of subverting a character's professed ideals by exposing his underlying egocentrism. In Silent Night (1945) Donald rejects the materialism of the holiday season and tells himself, in a ludicrously ghastly attempt at poetic metaphors, that this is the time of year "when the valves of men's hearts flutter open and drench all kindred beings with typhoons of good cheer!" Say what? But the rather violent imagery suits Donald's purpose. He is determined that he and his nephews serenade their neighbors with Christmas carols, whether the nephews or neighbors want to, or not.

This is the rare Barks story that seemingly alludes to the raucous voice of the animated cartoon version of Donald. Barks's Donald's singing is clearly appalling, but though his audience proclaim their displeasure by hurling objects at him, Donald will not be deterred. His principal nemesis improves on the Ignatz Mouse modus operandi by attaching a brick to an arrow and shooting it at Donald. "If that doesn't knock the Christmas spirit out of you," the archer says, "I'll try something really rough." Thus the tradition of caroling door-to-door degenerates into a slapstick comedy war.

Donald's "Christmas spirit" is exposed as no more than a facade for his egotistical exhibitionism. He is inflicting his discordant musicmaking on his unwilling audience much in the same insensitive way that people used to carry huge, blaring boom boxes in public places in the years before iPods.

Donald finally pays the price when that amateur archer forces him to keep singing by applying electrical shocks to the duck's behind (ah, a new variation on the Disney obsession with derriere gags) with what seems like an improvised version of a cattle prod. And it is amusing, albeit shocking (yep, in both senses of the word), even though I keep thinking that this is the sort of gag that Dick Cheney would like.

And now we come to my favorite Carl Barks story of all time, a genuine masterpiece of comics storytelling, "A Christmas for Shacktown," which was originally published in Donald Duck Four Color #367, cover-dated January 1952, and was most recently reprinted in 2004 in Gemstone's Uncle Scrooge #336 (which, understandably, is nearly impossible to find in back issue bins).

It begins with a sight that one would not expect to find in a Disney funny animal story that was intended for children: the desolate spectacle of an urban slum, populated by forlorn, unhappy children. Barks's opening panel still casts the eerie spell I recall from seeing it in my childhood.

Walking through Shacktown, the neatly dressed, middle class Huey, Dewey and Louie are seized by guilt. After leaving the slum, they encounter Daisy, who merrily reminds them of the Christmas presents they will soon receive. Speaking in unison, as is their wont, as if they had a collective consciousness, the nephews reply, "Knowing we're gonna get those things makes us feel like fat pigs!"

They tell Daisy that they have just been to Shacktown, and Daisy looks unnerved. And why not? Barks wrote and drew this story twenty years after the height of the Great Depression, which left its psychological mark on the members of the generations who experienced it: an economic disaster that wiped out the livelihoods of millions of people, most of whom had done nothing to deserve such a fate. Daisy says that the people of Shacktown "are down on their luck." The nephews, again in unison, retort, "And where kids live that never had any luck." There is that word, "luck," again.

So Daisy concocts a plan to raise enough money to buy turkey dinners and a toy train for the children of Shacktown. After the members of her women's club contribute, she still needs fifty dollars. Now, keep in mind that, adjusted for a half century of inflation, fifty 1952 dollars would be equivalent to hundreds of dollars today. It's not as small a sum as it may first appear to today's readers, but it is still hardly thousands, and yet Barks's story will demonstrate how difficult it can be to raise even that much money for charity.

Daisy turns to Donald for help, but Donald "wrestles with his yearly problem." While the impoverished children of Shacktown have nothing, Barks shows that middle class people don't have it easy, either. Donald must struggle to maintain the lifestyle of himself and his nephews, and finds himself wondering how he can afford to buy the kids presents "when I've only five dollars to my name."

It's a running gag in Disney animated cartoons that people can't understand what Donald is saying in his squawking voice; actually, you can, but it requires close attention. Barks could do a great deal more with Donald's dialogue in the silent medium of comics. What I find remarkable in this scene between Donald and Daisy is the subtle sense of humor that Barks gave him. For example, when Daisy tells him that she still needs fifty dollars, Donald sits back in his chair, serenely amused by his own financial straits, and says, deadpan, "So you thought of me &#Array; rich, fat, and prosperous!"

Donald's serenity turns to sweaty anxiety when his nephews and Daisy come up with the solution: Donald will beard the lion in his lair by asking Scrooge for the money.

We find Scrooge shoveling more cash into his already crammed money bin, an image that will prove ironic in retrospect. Scrooge is in a particularly stingy mood, and aims a cannon at his office door to guard against "some beggar wantin' a Christmas handout." The "beggar" turns out to be Donald, "begging" for the kids of Shacktown, but Scrooge is aggressively unsympathetic. Not entirely heartless under his bluster, Scrooge does agree to donate twenty-five dollars for the turkeys, but rages at the idea of paying for "a silly, useless toy train!" Scrooge is not just a miser but here fills the role of another archetype, the refuser of festivity, unwilling to allow people to enjoy themselves. His words about the uselessness of the toy train will return to haunt him.

Scrooge effectively imposes a quest on Donald: he will not contribute the twenty-five dollars for the turkeys unless Donald raises the other twenty-five first.

Daisy and the nephews prove to be genuinely unselfish: the nephews donate the money they were going to spend on Donald's Christmas gift, and tell him to contribute the money he was going to spend on theirs. Donald's reaction, complete with beads of perspiration, strongly suggests that he is not so selfless that he would have volunteered to make these sacrifices, but he goes along with this fait accompli.

Donald now needs only to raise five dollars (more like fifty in today's money), and yet his task seems impossible. As Donald asks people he meets to contribute to the cause, Barks quickly establishes that other middle class people labor under the same tight budgets as Donald.

Donald even turns trickster, complete with a disguise, to manipulate Scrooge into giving him the money, but, following classic trickster tradition, Donald ends up tricking himself: his schemes backfire. Donald proves to be more successful as a trickster by not trying: as Donald sits gloomily on a park bench, a passerby mistakes him for a beggar and throws a silver dollar into his cap.

Then Scrooge comes along, and imperiously demands, "Donald! Haven't you any pride?" But when Donald points out that he just made a dollar in five minutes, Scrooge loses his own pride, shoves Donald off the bench, and plays trickster himself, hoping other people will think he is a beggar, too.

Now this is a comedy version of hubris. Scrooge, the wealthiest person on Earth, is willing to demean himself in order to deceive people into giving him a few dollars. As it turns out, nobody falls for Scrooge's stunt; keep in mind that Donald succeed by not attempting to deceive anyone. Moreover, as with squeezing money into his vault, Scrooge seems to be tempting fate by posing as impoverished: he will soon really become what he pretended to be.

For once Donald is happy to encounter the invincibly lucky Gladstone, that worker of miracles. Donald asks for his help in getting the remaining four dollars, and Gladstone has enough Christmas spirit to operate on the side of the angels this time. True, Gladstone does have a few initial qualms: "Ah, me! I'll have to wish awfully hard &#Array; and wishing is a form of work. . . ." What wonders might Gladstone perform with his luck if he had the same appetite for work that Scrooge has?

A red hot dime that falls into the snow enables Gladstone to find a wallet, and Barks is careful to have Gladstone get the money that Donald needs from a reward for finding the wallet, not by stealing it from the wallet itself.

Donald asks for the dime, as well: still in trickster mode, Donald plans to play a joke on Scrooge to get even with him. Notice Gladstone's warning: "That dime brought me good luck! It might bring you bad luck!" As we saw with Gyro's snow chaser machine, tampering with the forces of nature has repercussions, and thus, it seems, applies to luck in Barks's world as well. It was a lucky dime that was the foundation of Scrooge's fortune (all together now: in both senses); this "red hot" dime from hell will destroy it.

Heading back to the park, Donald busts Scrooge's chops by dropping the dime into his hat. Returning to his money bin, which is packed to absolute capacity, Scrooge drops the dime through a skylight, and it proves to be the metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back. With the addition of this one dime, the weight of Scrooge's accumulated wealth becomes so great that the floor of the money bin gives way, leaving the epic sight of "a bottomless hole."

In The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Don Rosa establishes that most of Scrooge's wealth is in such areas as property and investments, and that the famous money bin basically is just a depository for his petty cash. The animated featurette Scrooge McDuck and Money made the same point (see "Comics in Context" #28: "Adapt and Assimilate"). Realistically, that would be true.

But "A Christmas to Shacktown" and other Barks stories don't work if we think that Scrooge's wealth is mostly located outside the bin. The power of the concept of the money bin for young audiences is that it is a gigantic version of a piggy bank in which they keep all their money. It's even like a fantasy version of a mattress in which an old person who distrusted banks might hide his life savings.

In "A Christmas for Shacktown," once the money bin is empty, Scrooge pronounces himself "broke": his nightmare has come true, and he has become the impoverished old man (or rather, duck) that he smugly pretended to be.

Again, I find myself thinking of the Great Depression, in which fortunes vanished overnight. Anyone who lived through the Depression, as Barks did, would be aware of the fickleness of luck, and of how one's security in life can vanish without warning. Just as Superman stories of the 1960s continually find the Man of Steel suddenly losing his powers due to red suns or Red kryptonite or other means, or on the brink of losing his secret identity, so too many of Barks's Uncle Scrooge stories place this incredibly wealthy character on the verge of losing everything.

It turns out that Scrooge's money has settled into a cavern far beneath the surface, but that scientists believe it is impossible to extract it. Scrooge is in despair until Huey, Dewey and Louie show him a cave that leads deep underground. Yes, it is a symbolic descent into the underworld to bring back a lost treasure. There Scrooge finds a "badger hole" that leads to the cavern, but it is too small to enter. The old bachelor Scrooge has sublimated his libido into his love for money, and we see it in Scrooge's tearful soliloquy about being so close to his beloved and yet so far: "I can smell my money! I can inhale its delicious aroma and sniff its delicate perfume!"

However, Huey, Dewey and Louie find a way to rescue Scrooge's money.

Sharply reminding Scrooge of his own words, they run a "silly, useless toy train" into the badger hole and back. Each time it returns loaded with money.

Carried away by his joy and gratitude &#Array; the ecstasy of love, you might say &#Array; Scrooge decides to give the boys the first carload of money in the toy train, and then faints dead away on realizing it consists of a hundred thousand dollars (which would be a seven figure sum today)!

So thus "A Christmas with Shacktown" concludes with the traditional end of a comedy: a great communal celebration, as the children of Shacktown "have a colossal Christmas." I see that there are some critics of the story who wonder what will happen to the kids of Shacktown once Christmas is over, but I find it hard to believe that the ladies' club would be so imprudent as to blow the entire sum of money on one big party; surely most of it was used to provide the children with long-term assistance, since, after all, Barks saw no need to return to aiding Shacktown in other stories.

Barks' concluding touch is his twist on the "recognition of the hero" scene, as the leader of Daisy's club acknowledges "kindly old Scrooge McDuck." It turns out that Scrooge is actually doing a sort of penance for his penuriousness, having been sentenced to the Dantesque fate of waiting endlessly as the toy train brings back his fortune, one tiny (albeit highly valuable) carload at a time.

THE UNCANNY X-DEER

In my Christmas columns I also survey animated Christmas specials of the past and present. Strange as it may seem. not until this year (as far as I can recall) did I ever see the 1964 Rankin-Bass classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which was inspired by the famous song by Johnny Marks. Up until now, I only knew the Rudolph special from parodies of it, some inspired (the subversive Rudolph satires on MadTV) and others not (the bland Robbie the Reindeer specials).

Why did it take me so long? I expect it is because I saw commercials promoting Rudolph and thought that the designs of the characters and the stop-motion animation both looked too crude, even when I was a child.

Considering my background, watching Rudolph in 2005, I immediately realized that Rudolph is a mutant, who is born with a super-power (a red nose that lights up) that makes him an outcast, and yet enables him to save the day. He bonds with other outcasts, including the elf who wants to be a dentist instead of a toymaker, and the Misfit Toys, who seem to be the inspiration for their grotesque counterparts in the bully's house in Pixar's Toy Story. In other words, the Rudolph special is X-Men for tots.

And how about that winged, godlike, talking lion who presides over the Island of Misfit Toys. What would C. S. Lewis make of that?

MUPPETS AMID THE MISTLETOE

Through January 29, the Museum of Television and Radio, at both its New York City and Beverly Hills facilities, is presenting a retrospective "Celebrating 50 Years of Jim Henson and the Muppets," which focuses in December on the Muppet Christmas specials.

The initial screening program started with John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together, from 1979. It was an interesting case study in the way that some elements of popular culture, like the comedy of the Muppets, hold up over time, while others, like country singer John Denver, do not. Actually, I would have probably found Denver overly bland back in 1979, but the production numbers with dancers are truly dreadful kitsch from the final days of the television variety show tradition. The Museum's copy of the special included the original commercials, and I was surprised to see that now late 1970s commercials look prehistoric in their naivete: "Dow Chemical and You," indeed.

Nonetheless, Denver had good chemistry with the Muppets and was obviously a good sport, and the show was well written. The special starts out with a classic, delightful rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas," by Denver with a different Muppet added for each verse (and Fozzie continually forgetting his line). The high point of the show for me was Miss Piggy's attempt to seduce Mr. Denver, which culminated with La Piggy breaking into a fit of grunting, which was simultaneously porcine and orgasmic. But perhaps just as good was a scene of a simple conversation between Kermit and Denver, in which I was impressed by the late Jim Henson's quiet authority in conveying the frog's personality and deadpan humor.

At the end of the show Denver recounts the story of the Nativity, which is visualized by Henson through puppet figures. Hence I write a phrase that I never imagined I would use: I saw a Baby Jesus Muppet.

Next on the bill was Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, from 1977.

Shakespeare's King Lear intended to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, and we know how badly that turned out. As copyright notices posted in the Museum remind us, the Muppets have undergone a similar tripartite division: Disney now owns the Muppet Show characters, including Kermit (who was previously the symbol of the Jim Henson company!), the Sesame Workshop owns the Sesame Street Muppets, and the Henson heirs retain the Fraggle Rock cast and other, less well known characters. Hence, as preeminent Muppet aficionado Ken Plume has pointed out in reviewing the new DVD of Emmet Otter's, this version has been stripped of Kermit's onscreen introduction and narration. Ah, but the Museum's copy is intact, complete with Kermit! (Listen closely to the speakers of your computer, and you will hear Mr. Plume moaning softly in envy.)

Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas is an enchanting fantasy, produced and directed by Jim Henson, written by the recently deceased Jerry Juhl (whom Ken so eloquently memorialized here), with songs by Paul Williams (the animated Penguin himself!). Henson and his collaborators created a whole backwoods environment that suggests an Americanized counterpart to The Wind and the Willows, with its small talking animals and its riverside settings. The story also evokes O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi, as Emmet Otter and his mother each make sacrifices in an effort to afford to buy the other one a Christmas present. They are inspired by the memory of Emmet's late father, who believed in talking chances in order to follow one's dream. Emmet and his mother find themselves in competition at a local talent show, each hoping to win the prize money he or she needs to buy the other a gift. Instead, they both lose to a rock band composed of rather nasty critters, like an updated, musical version of Wind in the Willows' weasels.

But then Emmet, his friends, and his mother have an inspiration. They sing their songs together, and the resulting harmonizing proves to be more beautiful than either song had been on its own. Singing in unison provides a metaphor for the bond between mother and son; it also provides an unexpected benefit, when the owner of a restaurant hires Emmet, his mom, and his friends to perform regularly at his establishment.

Hence, Emmet Otter turns out to be a story of struggling artists, who search for and ultimately find the means to perfect their art, and who are rewarded by fulfilling the artist's dream: to be able to make a living creating and performing his art. Surely, beneath the sweet, folksy surface of this show, this is the story of Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and the other Muppet creators and performers.

The following week brought a new double bill, which featured a treasure which the Museum declared was "not seen since 1970": it is a Christmas episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, that legendary variety show of the 1950s and 1960s. But this episode was not the usual revue of disparate acts, but consisted of an original musical, The Great Santa Claus Switch, starring Art Carney and the Muppets. (Listen to your computer speakers, and you will find that Ken Plume's moans of envy have now risen to howls of despair that he lives in North Carolina, not New York.)

This show remarkably anticipates future Muppet history. Art Carney's interactions with the Muppets foreshadow The Muppet Show and the Muppet movies to come. One character, a reptilian Muppet called Lothar, who delivers prophecies (voiced by Henson), vaguely resembles the Muppets who appeared in the first season of Saturday Night Live. And one of the villain's henchmen, a bug-eyed purple creature with a curlicue nose, is unmistakably the Great Gonzo before he acquired his name.

The Great Santa Claus Switch fits neatly into this column's recent preoccupation with the theme of doubles (see "Comics in Context" #106: "Double Trouble," among others). Art Carney plays Santa Claus, and, as many of you know, this is a repeat performance: Mr. Carney also portrayed a department store Santa who becomes the real thing (long before Disney's The Santa Clause) in that wonderful episode of the original Twilight Zone, "Night of the Meek." Carney also plays Switch's villain, the "king of evil" Cosmo Scam, who plots to wreck Christmas by kidnapping Santa, impersonating him, and sliding down chimneys to rob everybody on Earth. So Cosmo becomes Santa's evil twin. For that matter, the strange creatures who serve Cosmo, who are called not Fraggles but Frackles, start kidnapping and impersonating Santa's elves, one by one. So these creatures are, in effect, the elves' evil doubles.

In the course of the story, Cosmo's creatures are all so inspired by Santa that they go over to his side, so at the end Cosmo finds himself isolated and defeated (though during the closing credits, mercy is extended to him, and he is invited to join the festivities in Santa's house).

Carney is just wonderful in both roles:" as Santa he credibly, appealingly projects kindness, warmth and understanding towards even villains, while as Cosmo he is like a slightly smarter Ed Norton turned supervillain, simultaneously nasty and funny in his evil incompetence.

It gives me great pleasure to report that the leading elf in the story, who saves the day, is named Fred, who introduces himself with a joyous number called "Call on Fred," which could and should become Mr. Hembeck's theme music.

At one point Fred the Elf tries to sneak out of Cosmo's lair while disguised as a rock. "I used to feel afraid," he tells us, "but this costume has made me a little boulder." I am in awe of the sheer magnificent ghastliness of this pun. I'm not kidding. Jerry Juhl, who wrote this show too, was indeed brilliant.

Another side to Juhl's talent was demonstrated by the second program on this double bill: the Christmas episode of Fraggle Rock titled "The Bells of Fraggle Rock" (1984). Ken Plume loves this series, but I'm afraid I rarely watched it back in the 1980s. As a result of seeing this episode, now I know I should have.

For a supposed children's show, this episode is remarkably subversive of the conventional wisdom about Christmas. The human character, Doc, explains to his dog, Sprocket, that throughout time many other cultures have celebrated holidays at the time of the Winter Solstice, including the ancient Romans' Saturnalia. The Fraggles, isolated from the human race, therefore know nothing about Christmas, but they have their own Winter Solstice celebration: they believe there is a great bell that sounds on the Solstice, thereby moving the "rock" (Earth) back on the path towards spring on summer.

Now consider the implications of all this. Doc seems to be saying that Christmas is simply one of numerous holidays celebrated around the time of the Winter Solstice, and perhaps implying that it is the Solstice that is the key point of the holiday, and not, say, the birth of Christ. Moreover, even children watching the show know that the Earth does not move in its orbit because of some magic bell. If the Fraggles have constructed their Winter solstice holiday around a fable with no basis in reality, what might that imply about Christmas?

But no, in the end, Fraggle Rock does not debunk Christmas or other religious holidays, but rather reaffirms them. The Fraggles discover that the real meaning of their holiday lies in the spirituality within each one of them. Hence, in essence, Christmas, Hanukkah, the Fraggles' Day of the Bells, and all the other Winter Solstice holidays are means of honoring the same quest for the eternal within all human and Fraggle hearts. This is a more profound form of wisdom than I can recall finding in any other "children's" Christmas special. Bravo, Mr. Juhl and his co-writers. And now I am envious that Ken has seen so much more Fraggle Rock than I have.

As a bonus, the Museum is also running an exhibition, "The Muppets Say Cheese: The Photography of John E. Barrett," through April 30. Barrett is took astonishingly inventive and funny still photographs of the Muppets for various purposes, including books, calendars, and publicity materials. Here on exhibit are the Muppets in parodies of "Vanity Fair"-style celebrity photography. Here are satires on magazine covers and ads, such as Miss Piggy's newly relevant impersonation of "Martha Stewart: Living" in "Miss Piggy: Having," or the startling "Guess Who" with a disheveled Piggy standing before an unmade bed. Here are visual lampoons of plays ("A Midsummer Pig's Dream, or Much Ado about Moi") and movies (Kermit and Piggy as the Woody Allen and Diane Keaton of "Annie Hall") and even comics-style material (Miss Piggy is "Cochon the Barbarian"!).

My favorites were examples from "The Kermitage Collection," wherein Barrett uses the Muppets to satirize great paintings. What made it even more delightful for me is that I have seen some of the paintings being parodied in person. Rembrandt's "Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer" hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Television and Radio instead presents us with "Arosfroggle Contemplating the Bust of a Twerp," namely Gonzo. Similarly, can I ever again look at Picasso's "Woman Before a Mirror" in the Met's modern art galleries without thinking of Barrett's equally cubist "Pig Before a Mirror"? Whether Barrett is targeting Rembrandt or Picasso or Vermeer or Gainsborough, he captures the look of the original so well in lovingly mocking it, marking him as a rarity: a brilliant satirist who uses not the written or spoken word but a still camera and film.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF SPONGEBOB

If his current role as Internet impresario ever comes to an end, IGN Comics editor Ken Plume could always get a job as a Christmas season deejay. Each year Ken compiles a new CD of Christmas songs and sends copies to lucky friends of his. A little while ago I was playing this year's Christmas CD on my computer when, near the very end, I recognized an all too familiar voice. It was SpongeBob SquarePants singing about Christmas! It was then that I realized that Ken too has succumbed to the growing cult of SpongeBob. It's like being in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Feeling like a lone Squidward in an exploding population of SpongeBobs, I decided to bear witness myself to a holiday shrine erected to the Porous One. This took the form of a three-piece work of art called "Tri-Sectional Resurrectional," created by Joe Mantello, which was on exhibit earlier this month at the Kustera Tilton Gallery in Manhattan. The artwork was composed of fabrics, party decorations, and, most prominently, toys and other paraphernalia that took the form of the smiling SpongeBob. Oh, there were other characters, too, including the Simpsons, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and even pictures of Bob Marley (who performed tunes but wasn't a toon), but it was obvious who the Zeus of this pantheon really was.

In the center of the principal construction, which took up an entire wall, was a SpongeBob doll, clad in a baseball uniform, reclining in a hammock. According to The New York Times, he was "in the position of the central deity," and this section of the work was titled, "SpongeBob SquarePants in Glory, Ascension, or the Manger."

In 1921 William Butler Yeats wrote his great poem. "The Second Coming," about the approaching end of the millennium and the start of the millennium in which we find ourselves today. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." Why, he could have been writing about the present state of the Marvel and DC Universes. And yet, he continued, "Surely some revelation is at hand."

Yeats famously concluded his poem by asking, "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" SpongeBob isn't rough; porous is he. But I like SpongeBob's revelation, inscribed on a smaller Mantello construction near the door to the gallery: "Life is Good." Now there's the Christmas spirit. See you in 2006!

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Many months ago I gave an interview to the BBC for its radio special on the history of superheroes. I don't know if I made the final cut, but you can hear the show on BBC Radio 2's website. It won't be available for long, so act now!